January 22, 2010

I will fly to Anaheim for the Craft and Hobby Show from tomorrow, don't know if I will be able to update anything on the blog, but I'm excited. Anybody will be there too? Or perhaps Los Angeles? I plan to check out some nice stores over there, any suggestions are welcome.

Before I go, here's a very very brief update for what I've seen yesterday. Mark's came to our office and gave us some introduction of their upcoming products, many of the series are very attractive I can't report right now. Mark's is doing exceptionally well in terms of business in Japan contrary to the current Japanese market situation. I think they have over 10 retail stores alone in addition to their wholesale business. They are currently exhibiting in Masion et Objet in Paris.

One of the series is called Scrapaholic, which features light weighted scrapbooking products. They have some very nice notebooks, stickers and masking tapes beautifully done. Seen here are just two of the new masking tapes and a Scrapaholic notebook. I hope to show you more when I come back from Anaheim.

January 21, 2010

What I don't like about hipster PDA is basically because of poor styling and the ugliness of a binder clip. That's why I created mind.Depositor (currently in version 3) and freely downloadable GTD index card templates. However, after repeated attempts to find ways to group these different cards effectively, I finally settled back to using binder clips, except that I was determined to make them look better.

These GTD tabs were finally made about a month ago borrowing the idea from Clip-rite, a company founded by Janet L who grew up in Brazil and later moved to United States. I met her last year in Japan and admire her can-do attitude. Her patented design is simple yet ingenious, solving everyday problem by combining 2 products into 1 (sticky notes and paper clips). Without infringing her patent, I guess, I modified to replace the paper clips with binder clips for my GTD dream set.

It is dead simple, anybody can do it with just a few pieces of scrap leather, cutter and some binder clips. You decide the size and shape of the leather piece, cut a slit in the middle which should be measured to fit the width of your selected binder clip, or any other types of clip you find pleasing. Then open and insert the binder clip through the slit, its done.

I used alphabet stamps to make impressions on the tabs to create 4 different GTD tabs: Next Actions, Projects, Waiting For and Someday/Maybe. In a more refined version, I added stitches and they do look a lot better.

These GTD tabs not only let me bind piles of index cards in groups, they are also handy for pulling the cards out of a storage case, in my case the mind.Depositor 3. I'm so happy to have done this, solved binding and accessibility of index cards in one step. Do try to do it yourself and let me know how it goes, love to hear your feedbacks!

January 20, 2010

I didn't know why I take this shot but now I can see the importance, I somehow captured the tiny text "hold that thought" from the book dart tin can label which explains a lot of my agonies over some of the meetings and discussions held in and outside of our company. Thoughts and opinions flying around without being organized re-organized and re-created. What a mess.

Alright, multi-tasking may not be the right word to describe what I meant, everybody has a lot of tasks that are in progress. Tasks are things to *do* outside of your brain, we can have a lot of ongoing tasks and that's multi-tasking. Thinking all over the places inside your head unorganized or time sharing your brain power into small chunks for different thoughts and tasks are not multi-tasking, that's incoherence disguised in multi-tasking, that's attention deficit. Worse, when you spit out these thoughts as opinions without respecting the subject in discussion and nobody takes on the role of a moderator, it gets ugly, points noted but discussion heading nowhere.

Thank God I had implicit training in Scout when I was young to learn proper ways to listen and organize, to hold thoughts and relate thoughts, to assemble thoughts corresponding to discussion, to reflect and accept possibilities. These skills should be formalized and taught in school, it can be great fun to play these brain exercises.

In 2008, a SAP pilot test was done to create an ordering system, comments were made. Too many mouse clicks, too slow. In Jan 2010, the system was launched, user complaints: too many mouse clicks, too slow. What happened in between? Attention deficit, lack of moderator, a lot of system integration bullshits.

January 18, 2010

We had a great cycling trip with kids from the neighbor on Sunday, it was an easy 5.4 miles ride and we enjoyed nice food afterwards. I particularly love riding on such a handsome bike, a Strida Cream Edition with Brooks saddle I acquired as a Xmas gift to myself :)

My goal this time is to further enhance a small portable leather case to carry 2 pens elegantly (elastic bands holding the pens inside a leather surface), add a slit on the cover to have an input notepad easily accessible, and use leather tabs combined with binder clips to have each of the 4 stacks of index cards beautifully managed. I can only do small steps at a time at very late night, so the whole process is a bit slow but got me into thinking and planning a lot.

One devilish thing I do in the process is to annoy people living one floor below us. They complained my son and his friends running around in our flat making noises on their ceiling, and that was in a weekend afternoon! They complained our air conditioner dripping water but refused to help locate which one, we offered to fix as soon as possible but we needed to find out which one, man. They refused to meet, they refused to talk on the phone and they complained. Anyway, I just needed to use my hammer to create holes on leather pieces for stitches in very short time slices, about 100 bangs in 3 minutes once in a while around 10pm, no later. Extremely satisfying.

I'm very happy with this new one, hope I can find more time slices to make it better. Small steps. Will update bits and pieces here.

January 12, 2010

I was fooling around with iPhone SDK at the very beginning to create an app to give readers short excerpts of blog post, photos, downloads, tweets. Guess what, before I acquired enough skills to actually create one, there is this MotherApp service to do almost everything for you.

Honestly, I don't think people, even myself will read blog posts in an iPhone app but it is fun by itself to create an app that's gonna be on Apple's app store. The Scription app is supposed to be out in January, let's see how it turns out.

January 09, 2010

I was arranging store displays the other day and suddenly realized we had been selling these different versions of Boston sharpeners over the years. They are all out of stock now, what's remaining in store are now for display only. Except for Dulton's sharpener (second from the left in this picture) which we only have a few pieces left. According to Dulton in Japan, they also stop producing this mechanical sharpener too.

Boston Pencil Sharpener Company was founded in 1899, acquired by Hunt Manufacturing Company in 1925, X-ACTO bought Hunt's Boston sharpener line, Elmer's bought X-ACTO. Today if you want to get a relatively low priced, metal, hand-cranked planetary Boston style sharpener, you can still get a new one from X-ACTO either in desk or vacuum mount. Although these X-ACTO branded sharpeners have their origins from the original Boston Pencil Sharpener Company, they are now made in China and the charisma is almost all gone.

Talking about mount, even though Dulton's sharpener is strong like a brick, the butterfly screw mount is its weakest point, you can't sharpen a pencil without holding the body. Perhaps that's the reason why Dulton is discontinuing it. It could be such a great product if it were vacuum mounted for desk use.

Of these sharpeners, Boston Ranger 55 (the black one in picture) is the most durable, heavy-duty and virtually indestructible, it is like a single piece of metal casted right from the factory furnace. While I like the steadiness of a self feeder, adjustable pencil guide is more like a classic to me.

The death of Boston Pencil Sharpener Company's classic happened slowly over a hundred year. The sad thing is the disappearing of its name which once touched so many people's life especially in America. Elmer's should immortalize the Boston brand instead of burying it's dignity in its ever growing brand list. Worse, check out the "Visit Site" link of Boston under Elmer's web site, you will be directed to http://www.bostonschoolpro.com/, an under-construction site with several pop up windows of Chinese online game advertisements. I feel so sorry about this and I've emailed to Elmer's a moment ago for this.

January 06, 2010

Moleskine will launch 6 different journals in a series called Passions in the coming February. Beautiful paper sleeves and for the first time in the brand's history each of these journals are fully embossed with a tight texture of themed images and writings. The 6 themes are Recipes, Wine, Book, Film, Music and Wellness.

When I first saw the prototype of the Wine journal, I wondered why the space for wine label is so small which looks quite impractical for wine lovers to collect peeled off labels from their favorite wine bottles. An enquiry was made to Moleskine headquarter and here's their reasoning behind:

At the very beginning of the project, we thought about a âspaceâ to glue the label on each page but then we talked with sommeliers and they suggested us to add other grids (to have more information on the wine), instead of the grid for the label. I can assure that we had this suggestion from very expert persons. Anyway, there are the ruled and plain pages that can be used for this case.

They made the choice to break away from the norm and perhaps people can download and print their wine label a lot easier these days so the space gives you more room to record your experience. As for the paper, the quality is exactly the same as typical Moleskine notebooks.

I took the wine journal to a sommelier, perhaps she is not the type to record anything, the journal simply didn't click on her. I'm yet to bring the recipes journal to an executive chef to see her response, I guess it will be fun. The journals themselves are actually a big leap from the previous Info book, music notebook and story board notebook, much more sophisticated with built-in specific framework for certain passions. You can argue though that this is a completely new concept and draws different customers.

Moleskineasia.com is now organizing a very unique exhibition to show off how people use their Passions journal, it will happen in 40 major traffic stores in 12 Asian cities. Each participant will receive 2 notebooks, one title for their discipline, one for another passion, call it cross-disciplinary sharing. The exhibition system is said to be huge Moleskine display boxes standing on floor which visitors can flip through huge pages with exhibits inside.

January 05, 2010

I brought a 2010 diary eventually, despite hundreds of styles we offer in our stores, I couldn't choose one I like so eventually I settled to make my choice regardless of the cover design, just the content. And I love Alife Design's content best, it has a vague resemblance of NAVA Design's font and layout which I also love. Yup, I gave up using Moleskine diary, couldn't find the layout design beauty out of it.

Much the same as how I did a 1Q84 book cover (in progress, finished book one), I used scrap paper bag, butter paper, MT masking tapes, stamps and photos printed on coarse paper to create a collage cover I like. It is durable enough for parts where butter paper is glued onto the surface.

The beauty of a collaged cover is that it ages well :). You don't have to worry too much about protecting its appearance coz you already accepted that battered look as a design. Fixing peeling corners is easy, just stick something on it by tapes.

The problem with Alife Design's diary is that it lacks a bookmark, but this can be easily fixed by gluing a ribbon to the spine. I chose to fix a soft leather strip on the back page which looks more like a real bookmark to me. I looooove this diary ;)

January 03, 2010

This old leather suitcase travelled around the world with its previous owner but ended up in our stores as decoration. I had seen it in 3 different stores in different occasions already, I don't know why but I feel sad seeing it being used that way.

From what I gathered, this suitcase belonged to Mr. and Mrs. Jack Henninger who came from Santa Rosa California and went on board with the ocean liner Gripsholm on 17th Sep 1957 in Gothenburg, a few months after the ship's maiden voyage from Copenhagen to U.S.A.

Mr. and Mrs. Henninger stayed in room 89 on main deck, it took them 8 days to travel from Gothenburg non-stop to New York arriving on 25th Sep 1957. They had probably been to Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore and Manila as evident from the hotel stickers.

I literally went to Mr. and Mrs. Henninger's house, well through Google Map you know. You gotta be amazed how you can fly over to a particular spot on earth in no time. I spent the rest of tonight flying over my favorite places in Winnipeg, it is where I got my degree and spent a few wonderful years in libraries and parks.

Well, one leather suitcase got me into learning about ocean liners and Mr. and Mrs. Henninger's lives. I also had a great time flying earth reminiscing life in Canada. At the same time, posting on this blog leaves my identity trail on the net perhaps someday somebody will find out a lot more about me than what I could find out about Mr. and Mrs. Henninger. They left their trail on objects, we leave our trail on the net.

Walter Isaacson: Steve JobsLove hearing the stories all over again, some of them especially what happened in the past few years are new to me. Most importantly it is a closer portrait of Steve than all other books about him. Isaacson recorded audios during his interview with Steve, check out 60 minutes special and you will hear Steve's own voice. RIP Steve. (****)